


Narutostuck: Triptych

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Series: Narutostuck [11]
Category: Homestuck, Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Human/Troll Society, Angst, Angst and Feels, Captivity, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Curiosity, Cute, First Meetings, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Loneliness, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-28
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-29 18:52:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6389095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat, Terezi, and Dave: three first meetings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Narutostuck: Triptych

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written on 3/27/16 for a Tumblr anon, in response to the prompt: _Narutostuck: Dave, Karkat, Terezi: first encounters_. Section one is roughly concurrent with "No Child Left Behind;" sections two and three fall between "No Child Left Behind" and "Riptide."

**1.** There is a giant pearl-white egg in the middle of the forest, nestled on a bed of dried moss and propped upright by a ring of granite boulders still scored by the deep marks of massive claws. Karkat gapes at the incongruous sight, and wonders exactly how lost he is. All he wanted was to find some peace and quiet, and maybe a good spot for learning to use his new sickles without letting anyone else see him make a fool of himself. This is not peace and quiet. This is a baby dragon nowhere near any of the official hatching grounds, which means it's probably some kind of classified bullshit that crabdad will screech himself silly over when Karkat finally stumbles his way home.

Still... he wonders if he could feel a heartbeat through the shell. That would be really something, to say he touched a dragon egg. Or just to hold close as another, happier secret.

He takes a tentative step forward.

"If you hurt her, I'll kill you," a voice says from behind him as something cold and sharp presses against the side of his neck.

"Oh, fuck you," he snaps before his conscious mind can get control of his reflexes. "What would I even do with an egg that big? Make the world's biggest omelet? I hate to break it to you, but I don't think anyone has a big enough frying pan, let alone enough seasoning."

"That shows a sad lack of creativity on your part!" the person behind him says, but she pulls away the knife and when he turns, all her shark-like teeth are bared in a ridiculous grin.

"Hello, intruder!" she says, tilting her needle-sharp horns in a gesture that somehow manages to be simultaneously threatening and cute. "I'm Terezi."

"You're crazy and I'm leaving," Karkat says, and does his best to ignore her laughter for the next three hours as she follows him home, loudly correcting him whenever he makes wrong turns.

(She stays for dinner. He only pretends to mind.)

\-----

**2.** Rose invites Terezi to her house for additional study and training five times before Terezi accepts. In the end, the chance to improve herself with the aid of their cohort's other top cadet outweighs the chance that this is somehow a setup.

"Wait here," Rose says as she drops her books on a table inexplicably situated in a food block. "My mother has some old mission reports that we can practice analyzing." She opens a door in the corner and climbs up a narrow staircase, as if she isn't worried at all about exposing her back or leaving Terezi unsupervised in the middle of all her secrets.

Terezi restrains her curiosity for all of two seconds. Then she's up and poking around various drawers and cupboards, trying to figure out what's just normal human stuff and what's specific to sub-adults or career military. She has just grasped the handle on the refrigerator door when someone taps her shoulder.

She spins, kunai in hand, but the person in question is already back on the other side of the block, well out of her reach.

Terezi blinks. The human boy blinks back, slow and deliberate. The left corner of his mouth twitches fractionally upward.

"Hey," he says. "I hear you're the girl making Rose quake in her boots at the academy. That true?" He leans back against the doorframe, crosses his arms, shakes his lusus-pale hair off his forehead. (It's the same shade as Rose's hair. Is this her brother, that she guards like a precious hoard?)

"I prefer to think of it as the two of us making all our fellow cadets quake in well-deserved despair at their collective inadequacy," Terezi says. She lowers her knife, but doesn't put it away. Not quite yet.

The boy's mouth twitches upward again, perhaps involuntarily. "Sounds about right. So yeah, welcome to our humble abode. Don't open the fridge; Dirk's got it stuffed full of poisons and shit 'cause the one in his lab broke yesterday, and it's fuckin' rude to let guests off themselves by accident."

"As opposed to on purpose."

"Well, obviously," the boy agrees. "Anyway, I'm Dave. Nice to meet you." He tips his head in the tiniest approximation of a nod.

Terezi sheaths her knife.

\-----

**3.** The two Anbu goons toss Dave into an empty cell, slam the door, and lope off to other duties without even bothering to give him a parting kick. He has a sinking feeling that's not mercy; they just know anything they might do can't possibly match up to the pain Mindfang and her students will create just as a byproduct of their experiments.

It's a weirdly nice cell, though -- got a bed with a mattress and blanket, and even a window through which he can see the wall of the Uchuukage's compound. Maybe they think they can brainwash him into playing along, or that relatively pleasant surroundings will help him recover faster so they can space their tests closer together. Or maybe this is just temporary and he'll get moved to the dungeons tomorrow.

(He's pretty sure there are dungeons. It's contractually required or something.)

Someone moves in the hallway, comes to stand by Dave's door and peer in through the small, barred window. Troll kid, no mask or paint, irises still mostly gray but with a hint of rust creeping through in faint threads... and wow, those are the bittiest, most unthreatening horns Dave's seen since he and Rose spied on their mom's super-secret meeting of secrecy with the Sufferer. But if he's here and walking around free, he's gotta be one of Mindfang's, and that means he's bad news.

"See something you like?" Dave asks, not bothering to wipe up the blood still trickling from his broken nose.

"No, just another worthless, shit-for-brains traitor," the troll kid says, without much attempt at an indoor voice. His mouth twists up in a disgusted sneer. "I don't know why any of you rebels even bother -- it's not like you're going to win against the Lady."

And that right there, that's _interesting_. Because that's not how Mindfang's people and Anbu talk. That's how the Condesce's personal guards talk, loyal to the point of fanaticism, like she's their personal goddess stepped out of her shrine to guide them. But the Condesce only takes girls. So who's this asshole, and what's his story?

"Yeah, well, you'd think she'd have squished us by now if we're as useless as all that," Dave says. "But you do you, nub-horns, top-notch job with the party line."

The troll snarls, sclera shading toward orange as the colored threads in his irises flash weirdly bright for a second. "My name is Karkat Vantas, not nub-horns, and I hope you die _screaming_ ," he snaps, and stomps away.

Dave is pretty sure he's going to get his wish.

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline notes!
> 
> As per [No Child Left Behind](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6211990), Dave got inducted into the academy on his 6th birthday. Rose got inducted almost exactly a year later. Karkat and Terezi were from an outlying rural district where mandatory testing was irregular and badly organized. Terezi wanted to get into the academy, so she made sure to be present at an announced testing time-and-place that roughly coincided with Rose's testing in Kouin. Karkat didn't, because of Reasons (*cough*mutant*cough*) and managed to avoid the issue for another year until someone came knocking on his door and basically dragged him away. Once his blood color was discovered, he was promptly whisked off into captivity.
> 
> The Sufferer's rebellion kicked into high gear and open battle when the various kids were about ten. It lasted maybe four and a half years, until Dave et al were somewhere between fourteen and fifteen years old. Terezi got involved shortly before the rebellion turned to open warfare, and was a spy for about a year before she was captured and blinded. Roxy and Dirk took their kids and fled Kouin right about when the rebellion went public. Dave was captured about a year later, so maybe four or five months after Terezi was captured. By that point, Karkat had been held in polite captivity for three-ish years. They were all roughly eleven.
> 
> Karkat's captivity was different from Terezi's or Dave's in that he was being groomed for use as a propaganda tool, and for a while he genuinely bought into the regime's worldview, like he buys into a bunch of Alternian ideology in canon. The world kept knocking his certainties askew, though, and when he attempted some minor pushback against his restrictions and asked some fairly innocuous questions, he started to realize that he'd been lied to. The more rebellious he got, the more tightly he was controlled until he was also constantly locked in a cell. (Not physically tortured, though. He still had potential as a bargaining piece or a bit of shock value propaganda. This is one source of his guilt/self-hatred in [Damaged Goods](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4207080).)
> 
> Terezi, Dave, and Karkat all escaped when they were about twelve and a half, as part of a larger prison break orchestrated by Abyss as proof of their changed loyalty. (That was shortly before the mission in [Riptide](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6228667). Most Abyssal operatives were able to maintain their double agent status for another month or two after Feferi, Jade, and Aradia defected, but at a certain point deniability ceases being plausible.)


End file.
